Memories you can hold in your hands

I appreciate what technology has done for photography as much as the next person.

A digital camera means never running out of film or wondering if the camera captured the image you saw in your mind's eye.

Thanks to digital cameras, we don't sweat taking too many photos. Images of unhappy or out-of-focus faces are easy to delete, and they don't cost anything.

Technology has affected everything about taking pictures at our house, except the way we look at them.

We're old school.

Every photo passes through our laptop, but that's not their final destination.

We still print the photos we like, and commit them to thick, bulky photo albums, three pictures to a page.

My wife and I have been snapping photos on vacations since 1990 and logging significant moments in the lives of our three daughters since our firstborn came along in 1993.

Memories, I have come to realize, take up space.

Thick, leather-bound photo albums fill to overflowing a pair of shelves designated for their use on one of our bookshelves.

I am happy to report they are more than bulk collectors of dust.

In odd moments, more often than one might think, one of our daughters will decide to haul out an album or two and idly thumb through the pages.

I take a risk when I sit down on the couch to join them.

Mostly the memories are sweet, but they can also be a reminder of moments that are slipping away.

There's Olivia, wearing a blue denim jumper, waiting for the bus on her first day of school. It really does seem like yesterday. She's a college freshman now.

There's 6-year-old Alyssa, aboard a party fishing boat off the coast of North Carolina. There she is holding two small fish that she caught with some help from the ship's captain.

She is beaming. It's hard not to smile back at her.

And there is Aubrey, just 2 in this picture and smiling at the camera with an angelic glow. Here's another of her taken last summer, holding a baseball bat and squinting fiercely, minus the angelic glow, as she readies for the next pitch of her Little League career.

They say that content lives forever on the Internet. Maybe. But there is something permanent and personal about these book-bound images of the people I care about.

Sure, we store some photos on our computer. We even have some squirreled in an online repository.

But some things, like this photo of my daughters baking bread with their grandmother, belong within easy reach.

I could, at a moment's notice, pop a photo out of its sleeve and into a frame, or slap it on the refrigerator with a magnet, an eye-level reminder of a past moment.

But mostly, I guess, I like having these memories in the tangible safety of a book I can perch on my knee.

It's an old-fashioned way of doing things. But I also know there is nothing about the experience that cries out for technology to improve it.